Mirroring Leadership and Culture for Engagement

• In Event: Examining Cultural Contexts in Leadership Development

Short Description

The presenters will share insights from a university-wide approach to the development of an inclusive culture of leadership for academic and professional staff. The leadership framework, its evolution, associated programs, and assessments will be highlighted. Using the leadership-culture mirror, the barriers and enablers to engagement within the university context will be explored.

Detailed Abstract

An integrated and inclusive approach to capability building, leadership and organizational development is driving culture change and enhancing staff engagement levels at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
The intention of this presentation is to outline how a focus on leadership supported at the highest level of the institution is being understood as a key contributor to ongoing organizational success and staff satisfaction. The development of a leadership framework and associated capabilities is helping to create a university wide vision and clarity around what leadership looks like in the many complex environments and cultures within the organization.
The University of Auckland is a high achieving, publicly funded research-led university. In the words of the current Vice Chancellor, “the success of the institution in New Zealand and globally is achieved by the efforts and excellence of its people, past and present”. On the basis of this comment, the institutional focus is on the creation of an environment in which highly talented people can flourish, with the overarching goal of the University of Auckland becoming one of the world’s leading public universities.
To achieve the institutional aspiration it is fully recognized and acknowledged that leadership at all levels must be developed, valued and rewarded, hence the development of a fully integrated approach to capability building, leadership and organizational development to encourage staff inclusion in action planning. Evidence of embedding the concept of leadership into the institutional narrative can be seen in several commitment statements of the 2013-2020 Strategic Plan e.g.
• Ensuring an environment in which distributed leadership is developed and valued
• Setting clear expectations, developing potential, inclusivity, encouraging high achievement, rewarding performance
• Promoting high levels of engagement
The University of Auckland (UoA) has a positive reputation for developing constructive partnerships with the indigenous Maori population and also with Pasifika peoples, two populations that have historically been underserved in educational and leadership opportunities. In this presentation evidence of the cultural sensitivity of the integrated leadership development framework will be provided.
The institutional focus on leadership derives from a number of key triggers. One of those triggers is the external pressure of relatively low levels of funding and increased local and global competition – for example New Zealand universities manage on considerably less funding per student than is afforded in universities in Australia, meaning that, to be a top performing university, UoA must develop and support its staff to be very high achievers in all aspects of their roles and responsibilities. Another trigger is the outcomes of the biannual staff satisfaction survey which made clear that enhanced leadership and management skills are essential to an engaged and high performing culture.
One of the unique features of the University of Auckland leadership development approach is that it is intended for all staff, academic and professional and this also shows a strong commitment to promoting and embedding an institution wide culture of leadership. The embedding of leadership evidence into institutional processes such as performance review and staff promotion strategies also emphasizes organizational commitment. Recognition of different environments and cultures is shown by the leadership programmes being taken into different contexts such as Faculties and Service Divisions.
The Leadership Framework consists of 5 Leadership Dimensions and cascading sets of capabilities. How these capabilities are demonstrated depends on the role and context in which each individual operates.
The Leadership Dimensions are:
• Exhibiting Personal Leadership
• Setting Direction
• Achieving Results
• Enabling People
• Innovating and Engaging
This presentation will outline how the UoA Leadership Framework was derived and how the UoA suite of Leadership Programmes are designed around the 5 Dimensions. A short video clip from the Vice Chancellor on the criticality of inclusive, distributed leadership will also be shown.
Preliminary data from the most recent staff survey reflected continued improvement over a period of time in the immediate manager category. This data will be shown as well as data showing that Senior Professional Staff from across Administrative Services believe that participating in the leadership development programmes has increased their confidence in leadership and management and their levels of engagement.
This integrated approach to leadership, culture and engagement is further underpinned by other organizational initiatives – a People Strategy/Model and the use of an aligned set of assessments. A diagrammatic overview of this will be presented.

Participants

• Lorraine Stefani, University of Auckland

• Melanie Moorcroft, University of Auckland